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From: brucec@orca.UUCP (Windows on the World at ECS)
Newsgroups: net.micro,net.lang.st80
Subject: Re: "Smalltalk Coming to Micros!" ?... HA!
Message-ID: <945@orca.UUCP>
Date: Tue, 17-Jul-84 16:57:24 EDT
Article-I.D.: orca.945
Posted: Tue Jul 17 16:57:24 1984
Date-Received: Thu, 19-Jul-84 03:07:06 EDT
References: <1113@ritcv.UUCP> <1121@cornell.UUCP>
Organization: Tektronix, Wilsonville OR
Lines: 48

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There was a varient of Smalltalk-72 built by a company in Texas unconnected
with Xerox, called Rosetta Smalltalk.  It ran on the 8085, and was later
ported to the (gasp!) iAPX-432.  I used both for a while, and was convinced
that:

	1)  Rosetta Smalltalk was not as powerful as Smalltalk-76 (and in
	retrospect, it was nothing like as useful as Smalltalk-80).

	2)  Smalltalk is a pig on a small machine.  The 432 implementation had
	256K to play with, but a fatal hardware design problem with the
	processor board it ran on made it intolerably slow.  Good hardware,
	and the ability to run multi-CPU might have made the 432 Smalltalk
	(Intel sold it as OPL, for Object Programming Language) a reasonable
	demo for the chip and the language.

Recent experience with honest-to-Goldberg Xerox Smalltalk-80 on a Tektronix
Magnolia (there's a picture of it in the orange book), which is a 68000-based
system, and is usually described as being about half as fast as a Dorado,
have convinced me that Smalltalk is a viable programming language ON A
REASONABLE PROCESSOR.  The problem is that there aren't many micros which
have the combination of features which make them really efficient for
implementing the Smalltalk virtual machine.  The 68000 works, but it needs a
lot of help, in terms of support hardware, and that costs money.  The Mac was
built for large-scale, low-cost manufacturing, not high performance (the real
killer is the way it handles the screen; it's quite elegant, and very
cost-effective, but it would probably cut Smalltalk's throat on BitBlT).
Smalltalk really needs large memories (> 1 Meg) and a hard disk, which adds
quite a bit of money to any system.

There's an apocryphal story I heard a couple of years ago, that the DEC
implementation of Smalltalk-80 on the VAX used an entire 11-780 (single-user),
and ran at 20 Kbytecodes per second, until it hit a BitBlT, at which point
it went down to below 1.  By contrast, Apple says that its Lisa Smalltalk ran
at > 5 Kbytecodes/sec, and the Dorado is supposed to be capable of >30K.

I think that Smalltalk is a lovely system, as long as it has reasonable
response.  Right now that means at least $15K, but in two years or so it
will be much less.

				Bruce Cohen
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